All I have to say to Misters Willis and Foxx is, “Wouldst thou willingly partake in the franchise that felled Jeff Gerstmann?”

For the non-videogame players or non-videogame industry enthusiasts out there, I’ll paraphrase this verbose and hypothetical newspost by Jerry Holkins, a.k.a Tycho from the webcomic Penny Arcade; to wit, GameSpot editor Jeff Gerstmann scored the Kane & Lynch videogame as a 6 out of a possible 10 while the online magazine was running several ads and other widgets promoting the game’s release.

And just as in the situation with the Iron Cross movie review, the magazine saw it as an embarrassment, so they fired Gerstmann’s ass. Well, not officially, but that’s how everyone interpreted it—and are still viewing it to this day.

In any case, the original videogame concerns a deathrow inmate named Kane (played by Willis) who along with a schizophrenic killer named Lynch (that would be Foxx’s role) is sprung out of prison to “retrieve” a stolen fortune, with the side effect of saving Kane’s wife and daughter. Second unit director and stunt coordinator Simon Crane is directing, and production is supposed to begin sometime this spring.

The teaser trailer for Predators that premiered at SXSW is online now, and… well, it’s a little to bitmapped for my taste, but it looks promising.

The film stars Adrien Brody as ”Royce, a mercenary who reluctantly leads a group of elite warriors who come to realize they’ve been brought together on an alien planet… as prey. With the exception of a disgraced physician, they are all cold-blooded killers – mercenaries, Yakuza, convicts, death squad members – human ‘predators’ that are now being systemically hunted and eliminated by a new breed of alien Predators.”

Laurence Fishburne, Topher Grace, Alice Braga, Danny Trejo, Walton Goggins, Oleg Taktarov, Mahershalalhashbaz Ali and Louiz Ozawa co-star. Robert Rodriguez produced it with director Nimrod Antal.

Predators hits theaters on July 7th.

Summit Entertainment, along with Davis-Panzer Productions, plan to bring you the next generation of Highlander in the summer of 2012.  The filmmaking team behind this past spring’s hit film Fast & Furious – director Justin Lin and producer Neal H. Moritz – along with the rest of the Highlander team are looking to start production in the first quarter of 2011.  Stay tuned for further updates on casting and plans to bring the film to theaters.

It looks like they’re looking at an $80–100 million budget. This is the same source who let me know about Lin’s involvement weeks before anyone else had wind of it, so… yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s good.

Related Posts: We Told You So: Justin Lin is directing the Highlander remake; EXCLUSIVE (maybe): Is Justin Lin directing the Highlander remake?

Over at Variety, Ian McKellen is quoted as saying that he believes the first of the two Hobbit films will begin shooting in July, though the films have not even gotten the green light from New Line. Peter Jackson is still working on the second script with writing partner and wife, Fran Walsh, and budget concerns and a start date will likely wait until that is finished.

McKellen went on to say that casting has started in New York, LA and London and that once started, filming would likely take over a year. Director Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy) has moved to Wellington, close to where the Jacksons themselves live.

McKellen isn’t the only one returning from Lord of the Rings as it appears that Andy Serkis is likely to reprise his role as Gollum.

Over at their Hollywood Insider site, Sperling announced that her sources told her that Hank Azaria would be playing the human role of Gargamel in the live-action/animated adaptation of The Smurfs with Katy Perry taking on the voice of Smurfette, the lone female Smurf (if you discount the shark-jumping Sassette, which I do). She also added that “Glee” guidance counselor Jayma Mays would be playing the pregnant wife of Neil Patrick Harris’ previously announced Johan, both human characters.

While Sony Pictures declined to comment, Sperling went on to say that the Raja Gosnell-directed picture would start filming next month in Central Park.

Nominally “illuminating the radicalized British jihad and undermines the folly of western culture’s attempts to alienate them,” Chris Morris’s Four Lions premiered at the Sundance Film Festival back in January, where it was short-listed for the World Cinema Narrative prize. The film will premiere in the UK at the Bradford International Film Festival next week, followed by a national release in May.

There is no US release date set, and… just hazarding a guess based on the fact that the movie’s a comedy about a quartet of terrorists… don’t hold your breath for one.

Every time a revenge thriller comes out, there’s a blurb saying it’s gripping and intense, and blah blah blah.

It also gets very old after a while. So let me just say that despite a been-there, done-that premise (a man is “forced to take the law into his own hands after a gang of local teenagers brutally kills his best friend”), this looks sublimely well-executed; shut up; and get out of the way.

The official synopsis goes like this:

Set in modern day Britain, Harry Brown follows one man’s journey through a chaotic world where teenage violence runs rampant. As a modest, law abiding citizen, Brown lives alone. His only companion is his best friend Leonard. When Leonard is killed, Brown reaches his breaking point. Harry Brown is a powerful, character driven thriller starring two-time Academy Award® winner Michael Caine in a tour-de-force performance.

There’s red band trailer over at the official site. The film, which was directed by Daniel Barber (the Oscar-nominated short film The Tonto Woman), hits theaters April 30, 2010.

Related Post: Review: 2008 Oscar-nominated Live Action Short Films

According to an exclusive at The Hollywood Reporter, Jason Segel (I Love You Man, Bad Teacher) has signed onto the project to star as the main human character, presumably opposite the usual cast of felt critters. He will also be working as producer on the project, alongside David Hoberman and Todd Lieberman (The Proposal).

It seems only natural that Segel is signed on, as he wrote the script (the plot of which is still secret) alongside Nicholas Stoller (Get Him to the Greek).

The film will be directed by James Bobin, who has up to this point worked primarily in television, including The Flight of the Conchords and Da Ali G Show.

Related Posts: Quick Cuts: Disney reveals info on Rapunzel, Tron, Muppet movie

Waititi is best known for writing and directing Eagle vs. Shark, an indie film about two misfits who try and connect with each other. Also a comedian and an actor, Waititi would be playing Hal Jordan’s best friend, Tom Kalmaku (who is supposed to be an Inuit).

Morrison is best known as Jango Fett from Episodes 2 and 3 of Star Wars, but he’s also appeared in a variety of films including the poorly adapted Blueberry (aka Renegade in the U.S. because only one volume of the original comic is available here) and Six Days, Seven Nights. He will be playing Abin Sur, the Green Lantern who ends up choosing Hal Jordan to be his successor.

Related Posts: Blake Lively set to star as Carol Ferris in Green Lantern, Ryan Reynolds beats Justin Timberlake, Bradley Cooper for Green Lantern’s ring (updated)

Starring such actors as Academy award winner Adrien Brody, Academy Award nominee Lawrence Fishburne, Topher Grace, and Alice Braga (I Am Legend, Repo Man), Predators is directed by an American named Nimród Antal whose major work has been in Hungarian music videos and TV commercials. However, he did release a film in 2003 called Kontroll which won the Award of the Youth at the Cannes Film Festival that year, so it’s not like Rodriguez picked a no-name to direct this set of actors.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the script (of which Rodriguez wrote a first draft) by Alex Litvak and Mike Finch concerns a group of mercenaries and convicts who get lured to an alien planet/game preserve. From the preview, it looks like the movie is doing everything correctly when it comes to making another installment in a long franchise including taking the story back to its roots (group of martially trained fighters runs a-foul of a predator hunting party) and then amping up the excitement factor (introducing new breeds or races of predators).

As I’ve briefly mentioned before, the thing I liked about the first Aliens Versus Predator Dark Horse comic and its novel adaptation was that the predator in question became the co-protagonist of the story because you learned about its motivations and the culture of the predators through the human protagonist Machiko Noguchi. Time will tell if this new movie will do any of the same, but I highly doubt it.

Related Posts: Robert Rodriguez to bring Predators, Machete to the big screen

TMZ.com reported Wednesday that actor Corey Haim (Lucas, The Lost Boys) died at 2:15 am; yesterday afternoon, Haim’s mother Judy told “Access Hollywood” that the coroner’s department determined that a cause of death was pulmonary congestion.

The autopsy also found that the Canadian-born actor had an enlarged heart and his lungs were filled with water; the official toxicology report will be complete in six to eight weeks.

Haim was a child star in the 1980s, stemming from his role in 1986’s Lucas, which earned him a nomination for Exceptional Performance by a Young Actor (Comedy or Drama) at the Young Artist Awards and prompted critic Roger Ebert to write in his review back then, “Haim creates one of the most three-dimensional, complicated, interesting characters of any age in any recent movie.”

Haim followed that with the TV series “Roomies,” but it will probably be his role as a teen who has to protect his mom and new hometown from a gang of punk vampires in The Lost Boys (1987) that more people remember. It was on the set of this film where Haim met another child star named Corey Feldman and the two went on to star in several movies together (License to Drive, Watchers, Dream a Little Dream).

After making some direct-to-video movies in the 1990s, gaining a drug dependency, and declaring bankruptcy, Haim’s career seemed to take off again, starting with a reality show on A&E with Feldman called “The Two Coreys” which aired in 2006 and other projects in the works. However, the show was canceled in its third season in 2008 due to some friction between the actors.

Haim is survived by his mother.

Created by Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney, you can find more of their videos here or even catch them live at the SXSW festival this weekend where they will be showing their short film “Eagles Are Turning People Into Horses.”

It looks as though the makers of the Twilight films have stopped kidding themselves that they might be able to draw in action fans, and have gone back to basics and the fan-base with this trailer for Eclipse. There is a hint at action with the posturing between Edward and Jacob and the presence of the Volturi, as well as (unstated) “mass murders of humanity in Seattle”, and it could still happen, as director David Slade has both his action and vampire chops from the so-so 30 Days of Night. Overall, it looks true enough to the novel that at least the rabid fans of the franchise will be lining up in droves for it.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse was directed by Slade and stars Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner. It will be in theaters on June 30th, 2010.

For example, back in February, Empire Online announced rather snarkily that Ginnifer Goodwin (Margene from “Big Love”) would be starring in the adaptation of Emily Giffin’s novel Something Borrowed. Directed by Luke Greenfield (The Girl Next Door), Goodwin would play Rachel, a well-meaning Manhattan lawyer who “accidentally” sleeps with her best friend Darcy’s fiance after a drunken 30th birthday party and realizes that she’s in love with him.

Now from The Hollywood Reporter comes news that “The Office” star John Krasinski is in talks to join Goodwin as the second male lead, sort of. It’s a little complicated, as Alcon Entertainment has also acquired the rights to the second book Something Blue which follows best friend Darcy’s single mother escapades in London with her writer-friend Ethan.

Except, THR claims that Krasinski would be playing Rachel’s male confidant in the first movie and Darcy’s eventual romantic interest for the second movie and unless there’s a character I’m missing or they tweak the hell out of the second book, I really don’t see how they’re going to pull that off.

Filming will begin this spring.

Yeah. This looks pretty damned good.

Tron: Legacy was directed by Joseph Kosinski and stars Jeff Bridges, Michael Sheen, and Olivia Wilde. It hits theaters — in 3D, of course — on December 17, 2010.